BOB ABERNETHY, host: In Egypt this week, one year after the beginning of protests that toppled President Mubarak, tens of thousands again took to the streets. Meanwhile, the lower house of the new parliament was sworn in. The majority of members are not young demonstrators, but members of two Islamist parties, which now hold almost three-quarters of the seats.

We talk today with Kate Seelye, recently back from Egypt. She has reported from the Middle East for many years, and is now a vice president at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Kate, welcome here, and it’s great you’re back, and how did it feel when you were in Cairo this time? What did it feel like?

KATE SEELYE (Vice President, Middle East Institute): Well, you know, I sensed, Bob, a kind of empowerment and excitement that I haven’t seen in Egypt for a very long time, and I’ve been reporting there for years. Egyptians overthrew a dictator. They’re now politically empowered. They found their voice. They’re engaged. But at the same time there are new fears and anxieties. The country has been very unstable the last year. The tourism industry has collapsed. Investment is down, and people are hurting economically. In fact, there are people today who are much worse off than they were a year ago. So there are fears.

ABERNETHY: In those demonstrations that we saw pictures of, there were divisions, weren’t there? Some for one thing, some for…

SEELYE: Yes, it’s interesting. We’re seeing sort of a different take on the revolution. There’s one group that came out the other day, and they were celebrating, celebrating these newfound freedoms, and those were many of the people who did very well in the recent parliamentary elections. But there was another group, the young protesters who triggered the demonstrations last year who feel that the revolution is not over, the goals of the revolution have not been met, the ruling military council is still in office, and they are determined to keep protesting, so two different views of the same revolution.

ABERNETHY: What does it imply about the future for people there that in this new parliament there are three-quarters of the members who are Islamists? What does that say?

SEELYE: That’s right. Well, first let me explain who they are. There are two groups that did very well, the Muslim Brotherhood, a mainstream Islamist group that has been around for 80 years doing charitable work and is very popular among the Egyptian electorate and got 47 percent of the seats, and then a hardline, very conservative Islamist group, the Nour Party. Together, as you said, they make up nearly 75 percent. There is a concern that they will impose an Islamist agenda on Egypt. But the hope is that once in office, once held accountable they will both move more to the center, and that won’t be the case.

ABERNETHY: What about the minority of Christians in Egypt? What’s the future for them?

SEELYE: Well, they are worried. They have been facing more sectarian divisions. They’ve been the victims of more attacks on their churches, and they’re worried with an Islamist-dominated parliament in office. Their hope is that when Egypt starts to draft a new constitution, which it will do over the course of the next six months, that their rights and their freedoms will be guaranteed in this constitution, they will be safeguarded, and that is their best hope for the future.

ABERNETHY: And the women are a little nervous, too, aren’t they?

SEELYE: They’re a little nervous as well, and once again they are looking at this constitution and saying this is the chance to safeguard our rights.

ABERNETHY: Kate Seelye of the Middle East Institute. many thanks. Welcome home.

When President Obama spoke last night about the military intervention in Libya, he confronted a public both stunned and skeptical.

The military action was the product of a complex set of political considerations undertaken at great speed. The rapidity of the political run-up to the initial attack rendered ordinary processes of democratic consultation confused and confusing. Despite the fact that the attack on Libya was legally authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, thus sanctioning the action with the highest form of justification purportedly representing international consensus, many people in America and abroad continue to find the moral and political justifications for the act unclear or unconvincing. Many citizens are skeptical, in particular, about the extent to which protecting civilians represents the actual motive for the undertaking. While the president’s speech forcefully defended the humanitarian grounds for the Libya intervention, it also suggested other, arguably more powerful motivations for using force against the Gaddafi regime. Attacking Libya, the president suggests, is not simply an act of liberal humanitarianism, but of fidelity to America’s revolutionary origins.

President Obama’s principal justification for attacking the Gaddafi regime was to prevent a massacre in the city of Benghazi. Against the background of a history of foot-dragging and inaction by previous American regimes in the face of humanitarian crises, President Obama and his advisors determined that it would be better to use force early rather than “wait for images of mass graves” to flood television screens around the world.

This decision carries enormous risks. It justifies the use of force by reference to a plausible, but still hypothetical scenario in which the Gaddafi regime slaughters civilians by the thousands. It takes literally the hyperbolic threats of a dictator for whom hyperbole is a basic modus operandi and uses those words as proof positive of atrocious intent.

The president’s judgment may in fact have been correct. Perhaps Gaddafi’s treatment of the rebellious population would have involved massacre, mass graves, systematic rape, and other horrors of mass atrocity. But we will never know, and while it is better never to know such things, this not-knowing leaves the president—and the American people—with a situation in which the principal justification for using force is underdetermined.

A great deal of the president’s speech hinges on the extent to which his audience accepts his claim that civil war in Libya would involve “violence on a horrific scale.” The president does not clearly succeed in distinguishing the violence in Libya from the violence in other countries such as Yemen and Syria. This makes him vulnerable to claims that his administration is being inconsistent by attacking Libya but ignoring other situations. President Obama essentially sidesteps the issue by simply acknowledging that America cannot use force everywhere while asserting that this cannot be a reason for inaction in the present case. It is true that intervention in one case does not commit one to a perverse ethic of consistency demanding intervention in every case. But if Libya is not clearly distinguished by extraordinary violence, then the president’s claim that protecting civilians is the primary purpose of intervening in Libya is very weak indeed.

Perhaps, however, the protection of civilians is only one reason for using force in Libya, one that is most acceptable legally and internationally but which is essentially on a par with other reasons for action in this case. The president mentioned the desire both to send a signal to other authoritarian regimes in the region that their violence will not go unanswered and to assist the self-determination of the Libyan people. This is where President Obama’s remarks about American political identity and revolutionary origins are relevant. According to the president, passivity in the face of the Libyan rebellion would have been a “betrayal of who we are” as a nation. America is a nation born of a revolution. Our revolutionary origins have left an indelible mark on our national mythos, our sense of ourselves in our grander moments. It inclines the American people toward sympathy with others who take up arms to fight for freedom and, in some cases, commits us to coming to their aid, through force of arms if necessary. For us, defending human dignity sometimes involves using force to support a rebellion. Or so suggests the president. If one accepts this as a plausible account of how Americans justify the use of force—an account focused more on notions of national identity and revolutionary values than on human rights or humanitarian protection—then one is presented with an account more in keeping with America’s ongoing efforts to shape the global environment according to its revolutionary values.

If America’s identity as a revolutionary regime is crucial to how the president justified the use of force in Libya, then the intervention could amount to a dangerous and destabilizing act of “exporting the revolution.” But America, according to the president, is not only an “advocate of human freedom.” It has also acquired a hard-earned identity as an “anchor of global security.” American revolutionary values, on this account, cannot be understood independently of the concern to preserve global order by supporting international institutions, securing cooperation and consensus, and observing the realistic limits of military force. From this point of view, what distinguishes Libya from other situations is not the severity of its violence, but the fact that the opposition to Gaddafi seems actually to have organized itself into a genuine rebellion. At the beginning of the debate over Libya at least, the Libyan rebels seem to have organized themselves sufficiently to promise both an effective armed resistance and a potential provisional government in the wake of Gaddafi’s demise. This perception of rebel organization seemed to answer the concern that any intervention not result in broader political destabilization. We know now that the Libyan rebels are poorly organized, untutored in the art of government, and largely unknown. Time will tell, then, whether the American administration’s support of Libya’s rebellion will cause harms disproportionate to the goods achieved.

Whatever the future brings, one cannot understand adequately the intervention in Libya without coming to terms with the dance between nationalism, liberal internationalism, and political realism in the president’s speech. When the claims about international consensus and humanitarian concern break down under critical scrutiny, only the claims about national values remain. These national values, and the national identity they presuppose, need not and should not be understood independently of humanitarian concern. Without vital notions of national identity and accompanying notions of honor and fidelity, however, humanitarian aspirations lack ways of actually motivating action.

None of this, of course, answers the question of whether the intervention in Libya was just. But any moral judgment depends upon first acquiring an adequate description of the act under question.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: As the so-called Arab Spring spread out from Egypt and Tunisia, the New York film makers Oren Rudovsky and Menachem Daum were in Israel listening to the hopes and concerns of Palestinian Arabs and Israelis. Here is a sample — unscientific but still revealing.

SHMUEL GROAG (Israeli Architect): The revolution in Egypt, the first reaction of the Israeli public was kind of being in panic as if, you know, you see democracy on one side and people are panicking.

SHWECKY (Israeli Environmentalist): Listen, the situation is not good for us or for them, because there won’t be a strong leadership, and we are the ones who have to be strong or else they’ll wipe us out.

DAFNA: (Israeli Sociologist): I understand the fear of Muslim Brothers, but it doesn’t seem that’s what people in Egypt or in Tunisia want. They really want freedom, and I think we should trust them on what they want. They want to live properly. They want to have jobs. They want to live like everybody else.

ROBBY: (Israeli Founder of Organ Donor Society): I think we need to focus on democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, and hope in the marketplace of ideas that tolerance of other people in the region will play out to Israel’s benefit.

SHEIK NAMIR: (Palestinian Historian): The Palestinian people have had a lot of problems. Every time an event like that happens in an Arab country it’s good for Palestine. Every flag raised calls for the liberation of the Palestinian people, and we’re witnesses to that.

TAHU: (Palestinian Poet and Elder): We are now in front of a bright, new beginning, hopefully. Look at the Europeans. They are supporting the Libyan people, not their rulers. Before they used to side with the rulers. Now everybody knows the truth and feels sorry for the Palestinian people and all other people who are oppressed by their governments, as if they were imprisoned.

JALAL AKEL (Palestinian Businessman): All this will have an impact on the Palestinian youth, who will be affected by the events in the Arab world. Now they can claim back their freedom the same way they see it happening in Egypt and Tunisia and hopefully soon in Libya.

DAFNA: You know, something is changing, and I don’t know but I think it will come here. It’s very difficult to believe that the whole Arab world will be in riots and Jerusalem and the West Bank are going to be quiet.
ABERNETHY: The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics has released figures showing that in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are 5.5 million Palestinians, and 5.8 million Jews. Because of their higher birth rate, the number of Palestinians is expected to equal the number of Jews in about three-and-a-half years.

]]>Watch excerpts from an interview about religion’s role in the spreading unrest across the Middle East with Melani McAlister, associate professor of American studies, international affairs, and media and public affairs at George Washington University.

Can Islam make its peace with modernity and democracy? We highlight from the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly archive some comments over the years from scholars and experts on the compatibility of democratic values and Islam:

The Muslim people do not like freedom and democracy any less than anybody else. It is in the nature of human beings to like freedom. The problem is sometimes these terms are defined exclusively upon the basis of the Western experience, which is culturally bound and has taken many historical transformations to become what it is. The question isn’t whether Islam can live with modernism. There’s a much more profound battle afoot. It isn’t that modernism has won the day and now everybody has to conform to it. Modernism itself is floundering. Islam as a value system, not only as a religion, has to be thought about as a contending way of looking at the universe. Islam can live with modernism on a practical level. But there has to be an intellectual exchange. The idea that modernism is reality and everything else has to conform to it—that has to be challenged.

Muslims have to modernize their societies, and they’ve only just begun. It’s a long, painful, difficult process. They are having to do it far too quickly, and they are experiencing many of the same traumas we did in Europe: wars of religion, revolutions, reigns of terror, exploitation of women and children, despotisms, basic alienation and anomie as conditions change and nothing new takes their place. We are watching people in some parts of the Islamic world going through a process that we went through ourselves but have forgotten. We think that anybody can just create a democracy in no time at all, forgetting that it took us hundreds of years to develop our secular and democratic institutions.

Omid Safi, professor of religious studies, University of North Carolina:

The Qur’an is clearly not a political constitution as we understand the term today. Nonetheless, it envisions a society devoted to justice for all and to aiding the oppressed in light of a collective responsibility before God. Historically, Muslims have relied on monarchies (whether in secular sultanates or religious caliphates) that have been open to abuses of power. Today Muslims are seeking newer models of government that offer the greatest possibility of self-determination and living a life free from injustice. The question for any society trying to reconcile religion and liberal democracy is whether it will ensure for women and religious minorities the same civil liberties it would mandate for its own male members. This is not an abstract, theoretical question for Muslims. It is timely and urgent, and it will need to be answered in the affirmative.

What is the place of Islam in the travails the world is going through? Sometimes I’m inclined to agree with a sentence Mary McCarthy wrote in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—that religion makes good people better and bad people worse. Perhaps religion has added intensity to many of the struggles that are going on, but I don’t believe the actual struggles are primarily caused by religion. They have all almost naturally attained a religious flavor because the majority of the world’s people are now engaging in some way in politics, and their identity is more religious than nationalistic. It is popular to say that the Muslim world has not had a reformation, which is not quite correct. Some forms of Islam are very Protestant in character. Some are more Catholic in character. But Islam has not seen the elements of Enlightenment that passed from the West into the Muslim world fully absorbed into religious learning. That’s a revolution that is taking place now. It’s a gradual revolution, but I have no doubt that, 25 years from now, it will be a revolution that is largely accomplished.

Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle East politics and international relations, London School of Economics:

The genius of the West lies in sustaining an open society with constitutional checks and balances that protect individual rights, freedoms, and obligations. But the Enlightenment was not a coincidence. It occurred as a result of trade and cross-fertilization of cultures, particularly with the world of Islam. History shows that Islam’s decentralized institutions carry within them the seeds of democracy. The challenge is to rejuvenate Islam’s previous forms of local autonomy and decentralized authority—to limit the reach of the tyrannical state, empower the individual, and free the creative spirit. This ambitious project requires cross-cultural fertilization and receptiveness to universal currents.